Morning Wire - The Sextortion Crisis Claiming the Lives of Teen Boys | 4.12.25

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

A growing sextortion epidemic is driving a tragic rise in teen suicides, and families are fighting back to hold predators — and platforms — accountable. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to the world entire. Trouvee to little enterprises like on our own.com. The FBI is warning about a continuous rise in the sexual extortion of minors online. Foreign actors specifically target

teen boys in financially motivated schemes and have been linked to dozens of suicides. In this episode, hear from a lawmaker whose son tragically took his own life after being targeted and the CEO of a nonprofit teaming up with law enforcement to stop child exploitation. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Saturday, April 12th, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Here to discuss the rising threat of exploitation is Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestajakamo.

So Amanda, you've had several conversations with some of the key folks who are tackling this issue, One of them is Representative Guffey, whose son Gavin tragically took his own life after being threatened by an online scammer. He's now working to hold these predators and social media companies accountable. What did he tell you? Hey, Georgia. Yeah, Guffie has really become a warrior in this space since Gavin passed in 2022. He was able to get Gavin's law passed just a year after he lost Gavin, and he's currently working with fellow Republican Senator Ted Cruz on Cruz's bipartisan bill called the Take It Down Act. that would force social media companies to take down sexual images of minors within 48 hours of it being flagged.

Guffie shared Gavin's story with me when I spoke to him this past week. My son Gavin was contacted by a predator through Instagram messaging. He jumped off the video game with friends to have a chat with this female or so he thought. They began to share images and within one hour and 40 minutes Gavin took his life. They began to demand money, giving countdown. But even worse than that, after my son took his life, I'd never heard of what sex extortion was or had a clue of what it was. After his son passed, Guffie told me that his family was contacted by the scammers for more money, and he was even taunted about Gavin committing suicide. They began to extort Gavin's 16-year-old brother, a 14-year-old cousin, and then trying to extort me as well, fully aware that Gavin had taken his life.

they sent a message to me and said, did I tell you your son beg for his life? This past January, Gavin Scammer was extradited from Nigeria to the United States and was now facing life in prison. According to the FBI and our rescue CEO Tammy Lee, Nigeria and other African countries are most often tied into these schemes. Often with these extortion schemes, you have money launderers within the United States that are transferring funds

in order to get them overseas as well. And then typically overseas, in Gavin's case, to come out of Lagos, Nigeria, there is a well-known group called the Yahoo Boys that are doing a lot of these extortion schemes. According to Info Security Magazine, the so-called Yahoo Boys will inundate high schools, youth sports teams, and universities with fake accounts, and will use advanced social engineering tactics to coerce or trick their victims into sharing explicit images or footage. The group gets its name from the web service provider Yahoo, and these groups. criminals are tied to pass Nigerian print scams before they shifted to elderly fraud, fake job scams, and now extortion. A memo from the FBI Sacramento Field Office said that financially motivated sextortion offenders are often foreigners, and they primarily hail from West African countries like Nigeria and Ivory Coast or Southeast Asian countries like the Philippines.

Our officers that we partner with in digital forensics are definitely seeing a spike in these crimes originating from some of the African countries, where this is, financially motivated sex distortion. They'll post and pretend to be a teenage girl or a teenage boy asking for explicit images. Once those images are exchanged, then the predator from one of these African nations will go in and threaten them. Lee told me that artificial intelligence is widening the net of sextortion victims. More and more of these sect predators are going online and they're becoming more sophisticated in the ways that they go after young people, minors at they're trying to exploit. What's brand new that we're seeing now is AI. And AI is becoming a very

emerging threat for sex distortion where these predators can take an image of a fully clothed child and turn it into child sexual abuse material. One report found that 90% of all financially motivated sextortion victims were males between the ages of 14 and 17. The FBI said a 20% increase in reports in just one six-month period back in 2023. From a October of 2021 to March 23, the FBI in Homeland Security investigations received more than 13,000 reports of such activity online targeting minors. There were about 12,600 victims, primarily all boys, and at least 20 suicides. A more recent number, according to a USA Today report, found that extortion cases have been tied to at least 30 suicides of teen boys since 2021. And that number is

likely a low estimate, since some families might not even be aware that their child was a victim of extortion due to the online nature of the crime. Additionally, the cyber tip line, which is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or Nick Mack, received nearly 200,000 reports of online enticement of children for sexual acts, which includes extortion. That number has quadrupled since 2021 when the tip line received just under 50,000 reports. Instagram and Snapchat, according to Nick Mac, are the two most used apps for these crimes. Messages can disappear on both apps, which creates a false sense of privacy for kids using them. According to parents of numerous victims, minors will be messaged by an account they think

is a female of a similar age who might tell them that they have mutual friends in common. The conversation then turned sexual, and soon after the victim sends over explicit material, the blackmail begins. Guffy often speaks to young people about online safety, how to avoid these scams, and what to do if you ever find yourself in such a situation. I tell them, number one, don't send images to someone that you've never met before. I mean, you don't want to send an images, period. But if you do, make sure that your face and your privates are not identify on the same picture as well.

And if that does happen, don't be scared, be brave enough to go to your parents, to go to law enforcement, to report this. Because if you don't, if you feel like you can just pay them in this school away, they're going to continue to go after not only you, because it will never stop once you pay them money. they're going to continue to go after other teens and make them feel the same way that you feel right now. So it's very important for us to report it so we can go after these criminals. In his son's case, the scammers were asking for only a couple hundred dollars, he told me. I think it was $25 over to them, but of course, that's never enough. The key to this is to ensure that you never send a penny.

Because once you send money over, they know that they have you. Guffie also has social media companies in his sites. He's currently suing Meta, the parent company of Instagram, over his son's death. And he told me that he filed a suit directly, and he's not demanding money, but instead demanding change. He wants these companies to have some protections stripped over their lack of action concerning explicit content of minors. I think the number one thing that we have to do is to remove Section 230 or revisit Section 230, which is written in 1996. but it gives these companies who are the richest companies since the inception of man, it absolves them from being sued.

So we can sue them, but things get thrown out before discovery because they just say, well, we're not responsible for anything online because it's a public forum. Currently, he's working with Senator Ted Cruz on the Take It Down Act. The bill would require social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to remove any content that features explicit images or videos of minors or child sexual abuse material known as CSAM, or revenge porn, within 48 hours of it being flagged. The Take It Down Act passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee last week, and has been championed by First Lady Melania Trump.

As for parents of potential victims, Guffy is preaching grace and understanding. I'm saying for parents, number one, I think often we as parents get very angry whenever our child makes a mistake, and we need to learn grace again. We need to understand where we were at that age. And while we might not have shared pictures back and forth with one another, this is part of their generation. This is the Snapchat generation. So we can say don't send pictures, don't share pictures.

Nowadays, you don't even have to. It can be AI. But this is your reputation and it's getting spread throughout your entire community. It's not one school where you get this name. So you need to be there to fight for your kid and make sure you have the conversation that regardless of what the situation is. make sure that they know that you will be there for them. I felt like I had that conversation and that connection with Gavin. However, this was just so much shame that he didn't feel that he could come to me.

Lee emphasized to me that parents need to be speaking to their children about these threats. Conversations about stranger danger really need to evolve to include online safety. We really believe that every parent has to take this to be one of the most serious threats against their children of our time because predators are everywhere. And we used to teach our kids to watch out for strangers or people in white vans. Now we have to worry about who is coming into our child's bedroom through their gaming council or through their I-sone or their iPad because these predators lurk online looking for kids that they can extort.

Lee said that the average parent only spends 46 minutes in a child's entire lifetime talking about how to stay safe online. Since those conversations can sometimes be a challenge for parents, Our Rescue on its website offers a guide called Let's Start Talking. The nonprofit also spends time inside schools across the country with its law enforcement partners in all 50 states to discuss online safety. Closing out our interview, Guffy had a simple message. Tomorrow needs you. Tomorrow needs us adults to stand up and fight to protect our children.

But tomorrow certainly needs the next generation. If we don't have the next generation, then what are we fighting for? If you or someone you know thinks they're a victim of extortion, please call law enforcement. enforcement. You can report it to the FBI by calling 1-800 call FBI or visiting tips.fbi.gov. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for spreading awareness about this. You're so welcome. That was Daily Wire reporter Amanda Prestiakamo, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.